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My son has been watching Sal give lessons for the last year. Sal makes mistakes sometimes. My son usually notices and asks for clarification. We end up with a n
by delinka 14y ago
My son has been watching Sal give lessons for the last year. Sal makes mistakes sometimes. My son usually notices and asks for clarification. We end up with a nice discussion about the topic at hand and arrive at a correct answer. If it's math related, I've got it covered. If it's not, we do some research.
Classroom teachers make mistakes. Textbooks make mistakes. But the system is set up to disallow question of these two authorities. Example: Math class is the first class of the day; teacher follows textbook and textbook is wrong; child questions and is waved off; is that kid gonna remember at the end of the day that she needed to ask mom about this problem? No.
I much prefer when Sal makes a mistake because it makes for a learning experience. What's nice is when my son comes back some time later and tells me that Sal's video has been corrected.
- SudarshanP 14y agoYou are one awesome mom :)
- delinka 14y agoThanks for the compliment! (you assumed incorrectly on the gender, but I'm accustomed to that with the nick :-)
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoNo, I think that's great. Is it really like that though. I always feel like this is kind of a caricature: "The teacher would not dare let me question the authority of the textbook." That doesn't seem very serious. I'm sure, and this may sound mean, that this goes on some very bad rural or inner city schools but it's just such a ridiculous thing to say that I find it hard to believe it occurs in more reasonable scholastic settings. But people always bring it up ...
- delinka 14y agoIt seems to be a matter of convenience. It shouldn't be, but that what it looks like. It disrupts the flow of the teacher's classroom. It's viewed as yet another disruption, but the worst kind of disruption: the legitimate kind that gives the rest of the class an opening to continue disrupting the class. And that could affect perceptions about how this teacher handles a class. No, can't have that so just sit down and shut up. A good teacher can handle the book being wrong. A good teacher will tell the students that the book has a mistakes on this problem well before they have the chance to discover it themselves. A good teacher will have gone over the material in advance and know what's correct. Instead, we have teachers thrust into roles that aren't near their specialty; teachers that can get a degree and qualify for a paycheck because they can work the system, not because they know how to teach students. And interfering with that teacher's conveniences is not a good thing for a student to attempt.